'Robert Steinberg' on Serious Eats

Photograph from V 2 on Flickr Today's Cook the Book recipe is a hearty vegetarian chili, rich with cocoa flavor. There's no meat to brown, and the canned beans barely take any time to cook, so it's quick and easy... More

Photograph from jslander on Flickr In Scharffen Berger's The Essence of Chocolate, this mascarpone-and-chocolate-stuffed French toast is described as an "upgraded" version of the classic breakfast dish. It's much simpler than other stuffed French toast recipes, which call for making... More

John Scharffenberger loves this cake and includes it in The Essence of Chocolate because it places the flavor of good chocolate front and center. With only four ingredients, the recipe really is idiot-proof, and the resulting cake is almost like a ganache pudding, just solid enough to slice. More

This exceptionally moist banana-chocolate cake is soaked with molten caramel just as it comes out of the oven, rendering it—if such a thing is possible—even moister. Resist the temptation, the authors note, to add more bananas than called for, as... More

Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger approved of chocolate liqueur in theory but could never find a crème de cacao in the United States quite rich enough for their liking. So they came up with their own. In The Essence of... More

Photograph from kevinmarsh on Flickr Today's Cook the Book recipe comes to us from Heidi Friedlander, contributor to Scharffen Berger's The Essence of Chocolate, and pastry chef at Cleveland's popular Moxie. Baked in mugs or cups and dolloped with whipped... More

In late 2008, Robert Steinberg, co-author of this week's Cook the Book selection, finally succumbed to a two-decade battle with leukemia. Written with business partner John Scharffenberger, The Essence of Chocolate acknowledges Steinberg's bittersweet debt to the disease. For it was his diagnosis with the illness that drove the physician to apprentice himself to a small chocolatier in Lyon, to follow the trail of the cacao bean to Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago, and, in 1996, to co-found Scharffen Berger. The Essence of Chocolate is an extraordinary book. It covers the history, cultivation, and lore of chocolate—and it does it in deft and lucid prose (before he was a doctor or a chocolate maker, Robert Steinberg was an English... More

Dr. Robert Steinberg, 1947-2008 My friend Dr. Robert Steinberg, whose co-founding of Scharffen Berger Chocolates foreshadowed the chocolate revolution in this country, died Wednesday afternoon. He was 61. Robert had been fighting lymphatic cancer for nearly twenty years. In fact, it was his initial diagnosis that provided the impetus he needed to leave medicine and co-found Scharffen Berger Chocolates (along with his friend John Scharffenberger) in 1996. His flight from medicine to chocolate very much exemplified who Steinberg was—a lifelong searcher for meaning, truth, and relevance. I'm not sure that he ever found peace or fulfillment (searchers rarely do). But I can tell you with some certainty, after sharing quite a few meals with Robert over the years: he... More